Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

*This review refers to an advanced copy.  Cleopatra will be available for purchase in November 2010.

Ratings Explanation

Violence: Cleopatra’s family indulged in what has been termed, “an orgy of pillage and murder.”  Over and over, mothers sent troops against sons.  Sisters waged war against brothers.  Cleopatra’s great-grandmother fought one civil war against her parents and a second against her children.  Cleopatra’s father murdered her elder sister.  Cleopatra ably upheld the family tradition, eliminating a sister and two brothers.

Sexual Content:  Nothing could better have suited the twenty-two-year-old Cleopatra’s political agenda than motherhood.  And no single act could better have secured her future than bearing Julius Caesar’s child – while each of the new parents was married to someone else.  Incest.

Adult Themes: War, murder, adultery and betrayal.

Publisher’s Synopsis

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.

Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.

Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and–after his murder–three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.

Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra’s supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff ‘s is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.

Among the most famous women to have lived.  Cleopatra VII ruled Egypt for twenty-two years.  At the height of her power, she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler.

Stacy Schiff is a brilliant writer!  If you love biographies, “Cleopatra” will hold you captive.

©2010The Literate Mother